Another one bites the dust: The end of The Sporting News as we know it?

When I was a kid, about 10 years old, I used to get a weekly allowance of 50 cents, which I normally would use to purchase a baseball magazine.

One week, while running errands for my mother, I took the audacious step of using some of the change to supplement my stipend to buy both a copy of The Sporting News and the current edition of Baseball Digest. It was only another 50 cents. But my mother went ballistic and was angry with me for days for overstepping the bounds. In retrospect I have come to learn that our financial straits were pretty dire, but even so, this was 50 cents in the late 1960s, not the Great Depression.

TSN, which has gone through numerous incarnations in the last several years (currently under the auspices of AOL?), used to be considered “The Bible of Baseball.” I used to buy it because they had recaps of every game from the previous week along with the box scores. Then it was just box scores. Then they were gone. Suffice it to say, it is lo longer the sports publication of my youth.

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Free 501 checklist available (Excel/spreadhseet format). Makes it fun to check off which books you've read and handy to bring to the bookstore or library to get what you still want to read. Send your request via email to ronkaplansbaseballbookshelf (@)gmail(dot)com.

Ron by Roth

In my "day job," I'm the features and sports editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I host another blog. Busy, busy, busy.

I did a profile piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.